


like i'm lost and can't be found

by mooosicaldreamz



Series: spirits in my head [1]
Category: Ghostbusters (2016), Ghostbusters - All Media Types
Genre: Beginnings of a romance, F/F, god help us all, i wrote this three hours after i saw the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 16:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7540360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mooosicaldreamz/pseuds/mooosicaldreamz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The woman was odd, to be certain. But her skills were incomparable, verging on pure theoretical fantasies brought to life – the things that Abby and Erin had only imagined, things they had not even begun to think about imagining – Holtzmann created them. Her workshop in the firehouse was a mess of wires, metals, and a slight whiff of something burning. But it was Erin’s favorite place to go when things were not going correctly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like i'm lost and can't be found

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank my baeta eternal, lynnearlington. She also bought me drinks when we went to go see this movie, just hours prior to writing this fic. Anyway. The title is from "Spirits" by the Strumbellas, because I went for the obvious reference.

Erin hadn’t encountered many geniuses in her life. Not proper geniuses, not ones that hovered at the top of possible IQ scores and utilized those heights to create great, powerful things. In fact, she would say, if asked, that she hadn’t encountered any, until she met Jillian Holtzmann.

The woman was odd, to be certain. But her skills were incomparable, verging on pure theoretical fantasies brought to life – the things that Abby and Erin had only imagined, things they had not even begun to think about imagining – Holtzmann created them. Her workshop in the firehouse was a mess of wires, metals, and a slight whiff of something burning. But it was Erin’s favorite place to go when things were not going correctly.

She had grabbed a cab at three in the morning to their newly-decorated and assembled headquarters, intent on listening to their voicemails. With Kevin’s phone disconnected, and their notoriety higher than ever, there was a lot to work through – judging whether a call was real or not, and how high it ranked on their priority list was a job that often fell to whoever felt the most lethargic or bored.

But Erin liked organizing. And she liked their headquarters, littered with Kevin’s suitcases, and Holtzmann’s new, brilliant gadgets.

So she took a cab. When she arrived and opened up the front door, however, she found that she wasn’t alone.

“Hello, Erin,” Holtzmann’s voice rang out, from the back of the firehouse. She was wearing a welding mask, carrying a blowtorch. She also seemed to be holding it near an active microwave. It was the kind of flaunting of safety rules that Erin would have found devastating for much of her life and career, but it was only Holtzmann. If she managed to blow up their headquarters, she’d certainly find a way to fix it.

“What are you doing here?” Erin asked, dropping her coat on Kevin’s desk and entering further into the long room, towards Holtzmann and her workbench.

“I’m working on an ectoplasm repellant,” Holtzmann says, turning off her blowtorch and flipping the faceguard of the welding mask up. “I’m also working on an active translator for ghost-to-human contact and a black hole investigatory device, but that’s just a side project. It’s based in Gordanian’s literature, which I’ve been reading lately, so - ”

“Do you ever sleep?” Erin asks, almost laughing. It’s the first time the thought has occurred to her – funny, that human beings spend no time considering the basics of another human’s life, like eating or sleeping, except when those basics diverge from the norm.

“Oh, yes,” Holtzmann says, shrugging and turning the blowtorch back on again, though she doesn’t flip the faceguard back down again. “I sometimes sleep for around thirty-and-a-half hours at a time. It’s quite thrilling. I find my best ideas sometimes arrive during the delta wave cycle of my sleep patterns.”

Erin doesn’t have much in the way of a response for that, so she watches Holtzmann weld for a few moments, soaking in that smell of melting metal, watching the precision with which the other woman moves.

“You don’t often deviate from general Circadian rhythm norms,” Holtzmann says, stopping her work and leaving the hunk of metal, wires, and god knows what else to coalesce into something. “What brings you here?”

Erin shrugs, reaching forward to fiddle with a device in front of her. Holtzmann swats her hand away with a subtle look that Erin has come to recognize as the _don’t touch that or you may explode_ face.

“I had a dream,” Erin says, finally. “About my neighbor.”

“Ah, the ghost who haunted you for years, propelling your interest and beliefs in the paranormal and preventing you from forming normal social bonds in high school,” Holtzmann says, flipping her yellow goggle-glasses down and looking at Erin straight on. Erin nods, because, yeah. That’s what it was.

“It was just unsettling,” Erin says. “I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“The ectoplasm repellant I’m creating is for you,” Holtzmann says, in return. “You were correct when you said that it seemed like it was occurring to you more often than the rest of us. I ran the numbers.”

“That...is nice of you, Holtzmann,” Erin says. It is nice of her, so she means it. “Thank you.”

“I was thinking that perhaps you have some sort of attractive quality for the paranormal,” Holtzmann says. “I looked up the electromagnetic state of the earth at the time of your birth, but it seems as though nothing outside the ordinary was occurring. Perhaps you have some sort of spiritual quality. That, of course, cannot be measured in science, so I had to assume other routes of inquiry into the problem.”

“I think it’s just that ghosts like to spit on me,” Erin says, trying to inject some laughter into Holtzmann’s discourse. The other woman cocks her head, setting the inactive blowtorch down on the workbench.

“You should go back to sleep,” Holtzmann says. “Patty said that our case tomorrow was in a butcher shop. Very dangerous case to not be fully prepared for. I suppose I could build a knife repellant suit in addition to an ectoplasm repellant one, but I’d rather not have to stretch myself too far.”

“I’m already up,” Erin says. “Whenever I have these dreams, I can’t go back to sleep. They just get worse.”

“Well, I’ll sleep with you,” Holtzmann says. “Research has indicated that human contact and presence limits so-called nightmares by activating the dopaminergic system in the brain. Perhaps you will dream of a happier childhood memory.”

Erin barely gets out a word of protest as Holtzmann begins to gather random knick knacks and begins shoving them in the pockets of her overalls. She tries, though. The smell of the blowtorch is beginning to fade, and she’s beginning to feel that exhausted feeling she felt when she was sixteen and that woman was standing over her bed.

She wants Holtzmann to go back to work.

“No, no, you should keep working on the exploration device, or whatever this is,” Erin says, just as Holtzmann grabs her at the hip and pulls them flush together to start exiting the firehouse. “You know, a genius doesn’t stop working.”

“I’ll always have my delta waves,” Holtzmann says, grabbing Erin’s coat. “Plus, it’s been three weeks since I’ve slept longer than twelve hours.”

“You just said that we have a case at a butcher shop tomorrow,” Erin says, and she’s trying to ward off the frozen panic that comes with the prospect of going back to sleep on nights like this. In college, when this would happen, she’d sneak out she and Abby’s dorm at MIT and walk to the Great Dome at the Center of the Universe, where there would inevitably be some other random student exploring, avoiding, or simply being.

Erin was always happy to assume exploring. They were the kind of geniuses who only slept when their beta waves were no longer as good as their delta ones, she supposes. She was just kid scared of a maybe-ghost.

“Patty and Abby can handle a possible poltergeist,” Holtzmann says, waving the idea of a malevolent spirit away like it was a simple algebraic equation designed for an eleventh grader. “I left them some hummus.”

The connection between the hummus and poltergeist confused Erin just enough for Holtzmann to get Erin into an anonymous looking car parked just in front of the firehouse without too much protest.

“Earlier,” Holtzmann says, as she’s hotwiring the car – Erin should be concerned, but she somehow isn’t. “When I said you may dream a happier memory. What would it be?”

“What?” Erin asks, looking at Holtzmann as the other woman starts driving them somewhere. She now realizes she’s never really told Holtzmann where she lives, but it’s quite possible Holtzmann would know anyway.

“I’ve read that thinking of happy things can ease anxiety,” Holtzmann says. “I don’t have an electrocardiogram machine handy, but your paleness combined with the rapidity of your breathing indicate considerable anxiety. Funny, because you seemed calmer closer in time to the inciting incident.”

Erin doesn’t know how exactly she should say that smelling the experimental smells of their headquarters had calmed her.

“I can’t go to sleep,” Erin says. “The dreams get worse if I go back to sleep.”

“Tell me about your happier memory,” Holtzmann says, turning right so quickly that Erin smacks her head against the window.

“I…I guess,” Erin starts to say, rubbing her head and looking back to Holtzmann, who is very much ignoring the road in favor of looking back at her. Erin knows Holtzmann isn’t exactly an emotional communicator, but neither is Erin. But she feels what must be Holtzmann’s version of empathy rolling between them.

“I guess it would be when Abby and I got into MIT,” Erin says, finally. “I was so happy to get so far away from my house and from…everything.”

“The ghost,” Holtzmann supplies. Erin nods her head.

“But more than the ghost,” Erin says, watching lights flash by outside. “My parents thought I was crazy, and so did my therapist, and the kids at school. It was a ticket away from feeling like I was stuck.”

“I don’t think you could ever be stuck,” Holtzmann says, candidly. “I mean, physically, the universe is constantly expanding, the Earth is constantly moving around the sun, and constantly rotating. The chances of you ever being in the same place more than once at all are very slim.”

Erin gives a laugh, because she thinks it’s meant to be funny.

“But you’re very brilliant, Dr. Gilbert,” Holtzmann says. “And brilliance is a gift that only begins at birth – those people were wrong to doubt you. If it helps you feel any better, I wouldn’t have thought you were crazy if I had known you then.”

“You’re a genius,” Erin says, and she suddenly feels like crying. Holtzmann nods, as though she’s allowing the true statement. “What’s your happiest memory?”

Holtzmann stops in front of a nondescript building, somewhere. Erin has stopped observing anything past Holtzmann’s face. She would have been scolded for her lack of observational acuity back at Columbia.

“Perhaps meeting you and beginning to feel as though I had joined a family,” Holtzmann says, just before she pops both the car doors at the same time somehow. Erin would wonder at it if it were anyone else.

The building that Erin follows Holtzmann into is a cavernous brownstone, very sparsely decorated except for a few maps of New York and an enormous photo of the Large Hadron Collider. Holtzmann makes her way further into the house, and Erin follows. The smell that pervades the workshop is still sort of there, and Erin can feel herself calm just slightly once again.

“How can you afford this house?” Erin asks, because as much as she’s a nice, kind, non-invasive person, she’s also begun to feel like a New Yorker in her time here. Rent is a topic of discussion similar to the weather.

“It was an inheritance,” Holtzmann says, leading them to a staircase that goes down to the lower level. “My great grand uncle seemed to think that I was in line for it. Of course, he left me a number of his unfinished designs for flying cars that I’ve been working on occasionally. It’s not a matter of cannot, but a matter of necessity – why build a flying car?”

“And a ghost trap is way better, I’m sure,” Erin says, laughing. Holtzmann stop short in the stairwell and turns so quickly that Erin crashes into her. Holtzmann is resolute, catching Erin by the hips and holding her up. They manage not to fall down the stairs.

“If I can build a trap, or a device of any kind that can stop girls like you from feeling terrorized, then yes,” Holtzmann says. “It’s far better than a flying car.”

Erin stares down at Holtzmann, whose goggle-glasses lend intensity to her gaze back up at Erin. Her hands are still gripping Erin by the hips, still holding them in place on the stairwell. It’s a moment that seems to become the very center of the universe, physically impossible or not.

What breaks it is the chime of a grandfather clock somewhere in the upper level. Erin jumps, and Holtzmann sighs, digging in her pockets for a small device that looks like a car lock fob. With a click, the upstairs lights that Holtzmann had haphazardly turned on as they walked in turned off, and the grandfather clock stops chiming.

She turns away from Erin, and leads her into what must be Holtzmann’s bedroom.

It’s a little different than upstairs. Though it still isn’t the height of interior design, it’s been painted with equations, schematics, algorithms, constellation charts, and their Ghostbusters logo, tucked into one corner. It’s an astonishing thing to walk into – and Erin has spent plenty of time in her life devising and exploring complex mathematical and physics problems.

“God,” Erin says, looking upwards to the ceiling of the level, where it looks as though glow in the dark stars have been affixed to mimic what must be the current night sky, considering Andromeda, Pegasus, and Perseus are assembled smack dab in the middle of the room. “You really are a genius.”

Holtzmann has somehow vanished briefly and changed into a combination of shorts – shorts with the logo of Cambridge University on them – and a Spice Girls t-shirt. She’s also standing in front of Erin holding out an outfit for Erin to change into – and these are Tom and Jerry pajama pants and another t-shirt that reads, in huge letters, “NO.”

She doesn’t know what that means, exactly, but she changes in the bathroom once Holtzmann points out where it is. In the bathroom, it occurs to her that Holtzmann had offered to sleep with her, had even claimed that contact may occur. Erin isn’t one hundred percent opposed to sharing a bed with someone, but it had happened so rarely in her life that she had forgotten what it was like. When it had happened, the occasions had always been anxiety inducing.

When she steps out of the bathroom, Holtzmann is sitting up in her large bed, reading a manual on repairing Model-T Fords. She’s making notes in an even larger notebook. Erin stops short of climbing into bed next to her.

“You should just get in,” Holtzmann says, not looking away from her book, for Erin or her notes, which she seems to scribble without looking down at. “I promise that I have thoroughly checked the grounds for any paranormal infestations. Even Bigfoot.”

“Bigfoot is localized to Appalachia,” Erin says, still standing there awkwardly. “He wouldn’t be in New York City.”

“I was trying to assuage your fears on a ghost inhabiting my seventy year-old home,” Holtzmann says, jotting down some more notes as she lets the page turn in her book.

“I don’t know if I can sleep,” Erin says. “I know it doesn’t make sense. I went to the firehouse because I like being in the workshop. It calms me down.”

Holtzmann seems to take this into consideration enough to stop reading. She sets her book down and closes it, placing it and her notebook on her nightstand. Even as Erin is protesting, she can feel her hesitance starting to wane: the scent that she loves so much in the workshop must be more connected to Holtzmann than she had originally assumed, because even this bed gave it off. Perhaps it was somehow one of the pheromones on Holtzmann’s very body.

She was also just tired. And honestly, what hadn’t she tried? What could it hurt to give this solution a chance? Holtzmann had immediately arrived to it, and if there was anything Erin could trust in, it was the capabilities of a genius.

So she lifted the cover up on the bed, slipping in next to Holtzmann. There was some distance between them, but Erin was surprised, and not surprised, to find that her anxiety began to ebb away even faster than before.

“Erin,” Holtzmann says, reaching for another device that turns the lights off in the room. All the lights on the ceiling glow. They’re vague reminders of the otherworldly luminosity of ghosts, but Erin sinks into the bed a little to trace Ursa Minor, hovering just above her head. “Let me try something.”

Erin hums, then makes a noise of surprise when Holtzmann crosses boundary lines and slips closes to her in the bed. One arm slides across Erin’s stomach, and she glances straight downwards, towards the foot of the bed. There’s no ghost, as there hasn’t been for years, but it’s the PTSD of the thing, really.

“What are you doing?” Erin asks, trying to remain perfectly still as Holtzmann’s face settles very near her shoulder and her arm locks in place at her hip.

“Tactility between human beings has a strong correlation with feelings of comfort,” Holtzmann says, shrugging. “The correlation is higher when there is an already existing positive association and even higher when dopaminergic systems are already activated through attraction.”

Erin stares upwards, at Ursa Minor.

God, what is her life?

She tries to settle, as Holtzmann doesn’t say anything more. It seems to be a matter of fact statement, one that Erin is not allowed to dispute or question. She doesn’t necessarily believe it’s all that untrue. But still.

Eventually, she can feel Holtzmann’s breathing slow down, enough to know that she’s venturing towards her delta waves. Erin slowly closes her own eyes; listening to the rhythmic sound coming from so close to her.

She falls asleep. And even though Holtzmann’s arm is weighing her down, she doesn’t feel stuck at all.


End file.
